Japan Foundation Midwest Film Festival - FREE February 8, 2008

PRICE OF ADMISSION: FREE

website: http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/events/japan.shtml
phone: (773) 702 8574

The Japan Foundation Midwest Film Festival will bring together five contemporary Japanese films under the theme of “The Changing Scenery of Japan”.

The selected films focus particularly on modern Japan’s young, uninhibited, and dynamic postwar generations and reflect the changes that have taken place in Japanese society as a new global cultural awareness eclipses memories of World War II. Far from the stereotyped portrayals of Japan as a homogeneous nation of introverts, these films depict a Japan in which people from many cultures co-exist, girls and women are more independent, men embrace their feminine sides, and traditional Japanese family values are increasingly unstable.

Screening Schedule:
2/8 at 6:30 – All Under The Moon (Yoichi Sai, 1993) – 35mm
2/8 at 9:00 – Pacchigi! (Kazuyuki Izutsu, 2004) - 35mm
2/9 at 6:30 – Hanging Garden (Toshiaki Toyoda , 2005) – 35mm
2/9 at 9:00 – Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005) – 35mm
2/10 at 3:00 – Water Boys (Shinobu Yaguchi , 2001) – 35mm

Korean-Japanese director Yoichi Sai’s romantic comedy All Under the Moon (2/8) focuses on the day to day life of Tadao, a Tokyo taxi driver who, though he was born in Japan, is considered by society at large to be a zainichi – a foreigner in Japan – because his parents are North Korean immigrants. At his mother’s karaoke bar, Tadao meets Connie, a Filipino bartender whom he promptly begins to court and eventually moves in with. However, at every turn of their relationship he is faced with a number of difficulties, from his mother’s racial prejudice to the couple’s subtle linguistic differences and their prevailing economic constraints. The film was one of the first to grapple with such ethnic issues, and Sai inflects the proceedings with healthy doses of world-weary humor and unpretentious sentiment, making this a picture that, while firmly within the framework of its genre, at once speaks from and about the discordant landscape of Japan’s subaltern peoples.

Kazuyuki Izutsu’s prizewinning Pacchigi! (2/8) also concerns romance and relations between Japan’s diverse ethnic groups. This film, however, rewinds forty years to Kyoto in 1968, where tensions are running high between students at neighboring Japanese and Korean high schools. Izutsu frames against their street fights a Romeo and Juliet romance between Kosuke, one of the Japanese students, and Kyung-Ja, sister of the toughest Korean boy. As Kosuke works to understand Kyung-Ja’s world and culture, their compatriots also work toward a kind of understanding through their violent confrontations.

Based on a true story, Shinobu Yaguchi’s Water Boys (2/10) tells, with highly entertaining and madcap style, a very different tale of high school competition. When a gorgeous female swimming coach arrives at a rural all-boys high school, the raunchy men in training swarm the tryouts only to drop out upon discovering that this will be no ordinary swim team – she intends to initiate them into the traditionally female world of synchronized swimming. Only the most unpopular boys remain: five dorks with skills weighted more toward the mathematical than the aquatic, and with personal anxieties about everything from physical puniness to having crushes on teammates. When the new coach unexpectedly dumps them to go on maternity leave, they find themselves sans pool and sans instructor – and anticipating a performance at the school festival. Left with no one but a group of local drag queens cheering them on, they devote themselves to team and sport – a devotion which, in the end, proves more powerful than the combined forces of Japanese alpha masculinity.

Toshiaki Toyoda’s Hanging Garden (2/9) plays with changing Japanese social norms with melodramatic flair. Eriko Kayobashi dreams of the perfect family, and to that end she makes an unconventional – but seemingly successful -– family policy of complete truthfulness and transparency. On the surface the family seems okay, but reality, as always, is more complex. Her teenaged daughter stages trysts at the love hotel where she was conceived, her husband and son are both sleeping with the son’s tutor, and Eriko herself struggles to keep her depression hidden from the rest of the family. The result is a film that both illuminates the positive potential of new social frameworks, while reflecting a deep skepticism that flawed individuals can handle the consequences of such social experimentation.

On a lighter note, Nobuhiro Yamashita’s quietly comedic Linda Linda Linda (2/9) depicts a group of friends at a typical urban high school - Kyoko (Aki Maeda of Battle Royale), Kei, and Nozomi – who decide to form a rock band so that they can compete in the autumn festival’s talent show. Two days beforehand their lead singer drops out over a chipped fingernail, and in desperation they resort to asking the first passer-by to replace her - a Korean exchange student (Bae Doo-na of The Host) who can scarcely form a sentence of Japanese, let alone sing. Faced with technical shortcomings, the nearing end of their high school careers, and the peculiar cultural pressures of their adolescent lives, the girls focus all their energies on the preparation of a single song - the 1980’s pop punk hit “Linda Linda”. With a soundtrack by James Iha of the Smashing Pumpkins, this cozy sleepover of a movie is at once a nostalgia trip and a sweet tribute to those ephemeral, momentarily annealing personal victories that prepare us for big change in small ways.

Official Website: http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/events/japan.shtml